Bitcoin Forum

Can someone educate me the deep interest with Ether? I understand that it has an infinite supply but the supply is controlled based on rising difficulty. One advantage of Ether is its use for smart contracts, and usage ensures demand which could cause prices to rise.

But Bitcoins have a finite supply (unless the code changes) and its first mover advantage allows it to gain proper market share and ensure its demand, and with its limited supply, theoretically, prices should go up. However, if users were to hoard Bitcoins and there is no usage (delayed expenditure) which leads to low-demand, Bitcoins will devalue.

I'm confused. Resident economists, please enlighten me.

Because it's a Ponzi they generate a lot of cash for scammers

the investors don't visit Bitcoin talk so have no clue they are being fleeced

Hmm. But why is Ether a ponzi?

She is just spreading harm to the forum with these one liner statements if you haven't noticed in the last few days. Someone missed taking their meds lately  ::)

I always thought it wasn't a coin at all but a container for other alt coins.

Ether is popular because a lot of people don't understand the big question marks that this technology has. I remember once upon a time, how NXT was "taking over" with their revolutionary PoS and their decentralized exchanges and all that cool looking wallets. This is the same all over again. A lot of people and hype involved, sooner or later it will correct where it belongs, but it may still pump a lot higher, so maybe it's a good idea to take a position to short the thing and get some BTC out of it.

Check out this Coindesk article to understand why some people are bullish on Ethereum:

http://www.coindesk.com/coinbase-co-founder-ethereum-blow-past-bitcoin/

Basically, "anything bitcoin can do, ethereum can do better." Bitcoin has the first mover advantage, but that can eventually evaporate if it is less functional/capable than other cryptos.

Any other altcoins that were endorsed by prominent organisations such as Microsoft? Is Ether the only altcoin that managed to do it? IBM and Microsoft endorsed it.

Affter the price rise you can see a good charm in face of vitalik after selling his 25% of his holding to visit consensus and enjoy his stay. Smart contract have no real world use till now and all this DAO token overhype making eth to soar so much, but now before DAO launch to exchange eth already started bleeding.

before i buy something with an infinite supply, i would rather buy gold or a stock.

A lot of hype in Ether, but I see problem in terrible initial distribution where most coins which exist are from initial distribution which was used to fund development - but only those who really knew its not just scam to take Bitcoin and not deliver anything could expect to profit safely - so most non insiders just treated it as very likely scam, myselves included.

Do I buy Ether - definitively not. But I mine Ether with my GPU and sell for Bitcoin because it is so profitable to profit from this hype.

As I understand smart contract will be available in Bitcoin sidechains anyway and I preffer sound money like Bitcoin, so I dont see reason why in future people going to use altcoins and pay exchange fees converting between these coins when all they need is Bitcoin with sidechains with the same features and no exchange fees needed - but exchanges loves the fees from trading between coins, thus it does not surprise me Coinbase adding bunch of altcoins for trade - to profit from the hype as well.

It has one thing, Bitcoin needs... people who can hype the shit out of it to maximize profits, when they dump it. Ethereum started out as a brilliant idea to revolutionize the smart contract scene, and then people

got greedy, and they decided to market it as the solution for every problem out there... Now suddenly, it is better than Bitcoin and everything out there.  ::) .... If it gets the right backing, it might just fly with

that idea... and you will see it as a viable competitor for Bitcoin. They have a good concept, but Bitcoin is still better...  ::)  

Gold s infinitive as well, at least in our lifetimes, yet, the price s stable and even going up. Why?

yes might its one of many reason why etherum so popular in this year,and etherum have good promotions,good price,and its price highest after bitcoin price,its why etherum so popular,i said its was queen of altcoin ;D

because it's fast and the people wants a "normal" e-currency with instant transactions. :)

Scam, Ponzi, pyramid scheme, pump and dump, smart marketed shitcoin. Choose one of those notations and you're on the right path.
Many of the people, trading it know what will happen but they try to ride the wave as long as it lasts.
But get yourself out in time, otherwise you end pretty bad!

Is gold infinite supply?

The supply of commodities such as crude oil is finite but it is dependent on oil producing countries how frequent they want to dig up this resource.

For ether, it is unlimited supply but the variable here is the difficulty which will make it harder to get it.

But NXT never got picked up by prominent organisations. The issue with ether right now is the media hype around it, partly driven by DAO, and the smart contract status and tries to set itself different from Bitcoin.

The inventor of Ether is also known as a prodigy in Russia. And most importantly, Ether core team did not suffer the fragmentation and internal split that Bitcoin dev have. Internal core dispute leads to bad press.

I think that the Ethereum project is gaining so much attention because it was never meant to be a mechanism to store monetary wealth and never meant to be a bitcoin alternative.  The platform is attracting a large base of innovative developers due to its potential to support applications in a decentralized manner.  Decentralized applications running on a distributed ledger opens up possibilities only limited by our imaginations.    

EDIT: Whether or not it will succeed is another question....

It was made to be both.

Think about it this way -

Bitcoin has miners. The miners have 1.2 Exahashes of cryptographic hashing power just sitting there, mining useless problems for bitcoin

Now think about ethereum. You are mining for ether, that's correct, but this mining power is going to be used. Be used to host and process problems for other people. Isn't that more practical and useful?

Inflation is a more a problem for people that use a currency as a store of value than those who use it as a medium of exchange. I suspect that most people (except for the speculators) don't use ether as a store of value, so inflation is not a big deal.

Of course, speculators are interested because they are speculating that adoption will exceed the inflation rate for the time being.

I think Ethereum is getting popularity because of it frequent price increase and people are of the view and have heard that ether is goin to increase in value and so they start to buy some amount of it and so with that the price increase more. But the people should have to know that price is going to fall down deeper whenever the halving and price increase of bitcoin is started.

That distinction is not as clear as you make it out to be. Bitcoin miners mine transactions into blocks.

Thats right.If something has infinite supply,it losses its value and eventually become useless.I think Eth market is being manipulated by some big whales by creating fake hyip to attract noob investors.

it might happen right ? because altcoin very prone to price manipulation? people which has bitcoin above 1000 BTC was able to manipulate prices in the market altcoin. so i hope you remain cautious against etherum.
and do not be too greedy to buy many eth it is too risky

You can't actually say that Ethereum has an infinite supply. The PoW is still going on and it will continue for about a year or so. After that it will become PoS, meaninig that the stakes will be issuing new coins, however this suplly cant really be considered has infinite...

Ethereum is popular because of the prospect of applications and various other similar media being a form of value generation, and a lot of cryptocurrency users have computer science backgrounds, or some form of higher education.

There are also the investors and speculators that really try to push it as being the next big thing, so that has an effect on the value of the currency, along with all of the people on forums like this trying to pump and push ETH even though the value is routinely failing to perform and is often left to decrease and collapse after a large buy-in.

So Ether has become a huge decentralized SaaS and developers and organizations have to pay an unknown amount (since prices varies) each month to use this service.

A middle layer is still needed to convert fiat to Ether to use the applications that are backed by Ether. Unless this middle layer has matured, Ether won't get out of the euphoric phase.

Sure, because gold value on every century is very stable, I think gold well be the main currency in the earth. Many developed countries try to searching gold from various way because gold will become a very good investment for long time . my opinion gold it's not infinite supply but there are many gold in earth but it's very difficult to search them.

At the moment, I think most people do not understand what ethereum is for- only the few highly intelligent people. For me, the infinite supply is sufficient to put me off buying ether. However, it is something very interesting and let's see how it evolves.

ETH has a lot of good things going for it and is a really cool coin -- err, token. Internet fuel, or whatever.

That being said I think the prices it has been going for are pure crazy.  1 eth should not be selling for 0.027 btc right now, it's totally wild. 

I think a reasonable price would be somewhere around 0.006-0.009 .  That being said, even after its last big dip, it went right back up to high 0.02's so I guess that's just the going market rate for such high demand and promises. 

Personally, I've been unloading ETH as soon as I get it. Besides regretting the 30 or 50 or so I sold at 0.015, I've been happy to sell it as soon as I get it.

(That's fine if you don't agree with me, just my two cents.)

Putting your assessment in perspective:

https://i.imgur.com/FO3nKUi.jpg

I think ethereum control by devs and i heard this is a scamcoin and this is not the good place to promote those altcoin because this is bitcoin discussion not ethereum discussion.. For me ethereum is not popular they are complaining to ethereum because devs are experimenting the price of the market in yobit thats why the price there now is high.. but sooner ethereum again will down back to 0.005..

Possibly because people don't understand it?
It is easy to get sucked into hype.

You do know that there's a finite amount of gold on earth right? That was a incorrect statement. If you're talking about the universe (maybe gold is on a meteor flying by??) then there may be an 'infinite' amount in that sense.

There is less and less gold being found all the time just like how Bitcoins are halved every 4 years, but more of a natural process.

Also, gold is considered stable by you, but it does also fluctuate. It's also been around for THOUSANDS of years. Really terrible analogy tbh.

Ethereum is extremely popular because it is bitcoin with it's flaws rolled out. It harnesses the hashing power of the miners, and uses it for something practical. I've personally purchased about 1 btc of ethereum, and i'm already up 0.2! :D

Seems like a ponzi where the early "investors" are now benefiting from a flood of hype crazed newbie investors dazzled by "pump and dump" appreciation.

We've seen that pattern 500 times on the other Alt coins. Always ends badly.

The other altcoins don't offer things that even Bitcoin can't do. Ethereum provides a full development ecosystem, a Turing complete language, and a healthy development team.
The inflation rate will be low, and its mandatory because ultimately, Ethereum is a computer that runs contracts in exchange of ether.

Its trend now because it has good system unlike any other crypto and it is choosen to be mine by the miner because the block is not difficult to mine and so on its very profitable for miners to mine for this coin unlike bitcoin have diffuculty of blocks and same for others alts are not valuable.

Juat admit u have no idea wat ur talking about

ether is not a ponzi scheme. it is at this moment in time a better system of advanced smart contracts than btc, although we will have to see how they master scaling challenges ahead, again much like BTC
Some of the experiments are pretty cool

That said, ether is designed without fixed supply in mind as the tokens power the contracts and therefore will have increasing supply
BTC likely will be a far superior store of value

That's not a Ponzi scheme.

Infinite supply isn't Ethereum's biggest problem.  If there's ever a real use for Ethereum, the size of the blockchain will probably make it impossible for almost anyone to use.

It is because every single thing about m-ether is a lie. They say there are 150m$ of investing made in DAO. Another lie. It is a pump&dump scamcoin which is promoted heavily because they pay people for the job. I wouldn't go near anything related to ether.

because coins in circulation is more important than the maximum supply limit

also it has already a huge marketcap, and it is known that money attract other money and so on...

The supply thing sounds a little murky but i think it's overegged. Similarly no one's going to give a shit about future supply if things are exploding in the here and now.

Hey, you are right. Essentially, if Ether smart contract gets super popular, the globe will be using one main Ether chain?

50 GB of Bitcoin block chain is scary enough.

Prior to Ether, what other coins shared the same fate?

Finite/infinite supply doesn't really have anything to do with it being popular really. When you get right down to it, usefulness is what makes something valuable. ETH has all of the main features that define Bitcoin plus offers a ton more on top. What makes ETH different from the multitude of altcoins out there is that while others try to implement a few novel features, ETH offers a near infinite number of possible applications, allowing anyone to build their ideas on top of it.

This. It is literally that simple - people just want something that works well.

Ethereum is gaining popularity and adoption because it is made with a purpose different from Bitcoin. Bitcoin is made as an alternative to regular money while Ethereum is made as a platform for P2P contracts and apps thru its currency vehicle. :)

What adoption? I see only speculation.

 I welcome anyone to join us at reddit.com/ethtrader and join people who actually make money with crypto

Just to clear up some confusion:

1. First things first: Ether supply is not infinite - in a few months we will switch to a new algorithm (Proof of Stake) and mining will stop forever. Dilution will stop immediately. There will be a low inflation of possibly 0 to 1% per anno.
2. Many bluechips, some of the largest corporations on this planet are heavily investing into Ethereum or are at least researching it, including Reuters (News), RWE (Energy) and some of the largest insurers in the world
3. There is an overwhelming brain-drain happening. Many smart developers left BTC and joined Ethereum already.
4. The fact that we as a community raised $150 million in a month to fund the development shows that we will quickly outspend BTC development in a major way
5. ETH Network difficulty continues to explode, underlining that this is a real network that will quickly outpace BTC
6. ETH has much more use cases than BTC will ever have - it goes way beyond currency and as such you can argue that it will have far greater volume, especially if it can grab some of the IoT market share. Fact: After 7 years+ BTC has no scripting language.
7. ETH is incredibly, incredibly fast and way easier to scale
8. ETH is easy to program. The programming language is based on Javascript
9. ETH has the potential to revolutionize some of our largest industries on this planet. It has garnered so much attention that government institutions are now actively looking into it to safe money on administration / notary services and so on
10. Bitcoin was an experiment. It failed to go beyond currency. ETH is already there. We are doing it, right now.

Again, if you are bored of 1-2% gains or even 50% losses in the next months, then I welcome you to join us on /ethtrader

Take a step back and look at what ETH is (a huge and wonderful play on the 300B sharing economy and IoT revolution).

Then evaluate BTC and you will see that BTC cannot compete in any way and has already lost the "war".

Put on top that silly civil war going on between BTC devs. Put on top the fact that BTC is effectively controlled by the Chinese - there are large stakeholders that have an interest in seeing BTC fail.

Ultimately, you have to ask yourself, do you want to invest in a Chinese company or a network that is jointly governed and controlled by the world?

But what is stopping Chinese Ether miners from taking over half the world's processing power, all over again? They have access to cheaper raw materials, cheaper power to mine Ether.

The fact that they cant do that due to PoS. With PoS, only stakeholders can participate in the staking process and earn fees on the network. ETH stakeholders are spread throughout the world as it should be.

yes we all want something better that now,bitcoin have many problem on transaction or supply,or maybe price. but,have you think etherum will answer all bitcoin problem?or etherum just gonna be one of many crypto that have cheap price under bitcoin?

Because of the quick blocks, they arn't going to experience network congestion. Yesterday there was a period where just one bitcoin block was found in an hour, which increased the backlog. With Ether making blocks practically every minute it's not going to happen to them. And all the end user cares about is whether something works. They don't want to hear excuses or explanations about why their transaction hasn't gone through. They just want stuff to work.

So what is going on with the development or the push for Bitcoin thunder network now? The last I read, the thunder network is going to try resolve the problem of network confirmation.

It is too little too late. The lightning network is a last ditch attempt to save Bitcoin. I am simply not convinced it will come out early enough and even if it magically gets released next 3 months it will have a slow adoption curve. At the same time, ETH is making incredible progress not just as a currency but in all sorts of areas.

This risks that Bitcoin will drop in half are considerable and thats a risk I am not willing to take when there are coins with a more promising future.

Ether is popular becouse it has huge backings behind it. i.e banks

Infinite supply is better than finite supply, that is why many alts (like DOGE) are going for that. The price doesn't have much to do with it. Price is based on the speculation that the technology (smart contracts, blockchain, etc.) is worth x.

Bitcoin and Ethereum aren't competitors. They are made to do altogether different things. If Bitcoin goes down soon, Eth would most probably go down with it.

Prices doesn't works on theory here. Just on what some whales think...


Hoarding generally and theoretically limits supply without compromising on demand and causes prices to rise.


Disclosure: I hold Bitcoin, Ethereum and a little Lisk.

Mathematical wise, the inflation rate will all drop to close to zero regardless of constant supply or limited total supply, so if you have a little bit mathematical knowledge then you know they are essentially the same inflation wise

Of course limited total supply will create much higher potential for value gain, but you can always change a coin to limited total supply later when it gained enough market traction, which ethereum is striving for

The last code check in is 7 days ago. At least it's moving. lol.

https://github.com/blockchain/thunder

ETH is proof of work today, not proof of stake. But the fact is most coins are distributed from initial IPO sale - terrible distribution and even before going to proof of stake, not much % of coins is going to be distributed from much fairer proof of work - most coins simply ends distributed from initial IPO sale to dump to naive today buyers or dominate proof of stake era.

^^^^ At least someone understands whats actually going on with ETH.


P.S. If ETH is so much better than BTC can anyone link me to something ACTUALLY using ETH that matters? Where are these bitcoin killer apps and contracts?

The price of something is determined by two factors: supply and demand. We know the supply increases by a certain amount every year. But, if the demand increases just as much, then the relation of supply over demand will remain constant, and the price will remain constant.

Can anyone comment on the fact that the main Ether chain will be too large for practical applications?

I don't see any references to how the "gas" charges affect the ether supply in this thread.  Once the platform adopts a proof of stake system and discards the proof of work system, won't the ether supply diminish somewhat as more D'Apps come online?

Gas?

I've read in another discussion that the ETH core team are not very well versed in handling finances. I am unsure what this holds for ETH in the future. If a whole dev team is unable to come up with a good financial plan to chart the future of their own project, I am a little doubtful of their vision.

You can't compare gold's legendary network effect with some altcoin... that is delusional. Bitcoin can do everything eth can do with sidechains, eth can't do what Bitcoin can do since its turin complete. Honestly I think eth is doomed long term. Still a good idea to hold some for p'n'd sake.

Will you still be saying this when ETH market cap is at 10billion?